Time Condemns American Racism After Atlanta shooting, Ignores Facts
- Self-reported discrimination and biased sources reinforce media’s false beliefs about American racism
- Biased sources used to reinforce myth of a racist America
- Anti-Asian violence overplayed by liberal media
- Lang uses biased sources and insufficient data to prove the Atlanta shooting proves her belief that America is racist
OUR RATING = #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Cady Lang, in a Times article, reports on the Atlanta shooting in typical biased journalist fashion. Instead of reporting the facts, Lang focuses on her own opinions about anti-Asian discrimination that she believes in. As a result, she pushes her opinions as facts throughout the article. In order to couch her clearly held beliefs in a racist America, she uses unbalanced and biased sources and data to prove her point.
Major Violations:
- Unbalanced
- Bad Sources
- Not Objective
- Opinion as Fact
Though Lang acknowledges the context of the Atlanta shooting that other stories lack— the shooter was a recovering sex addict and said the shootings were not racially motivated— she does not report these as legitimate facts. Instead, she couches them in her opinion that this is another example of anti-Asian violence being covered up by the media. She complains that the shooter was named while the “the victims remained nameless.” Eventually, the victims’ names were released, though one of them was inconveniently named Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz.
This Hispanic victim is also in addition to, of the 8 victims, two of them presenting as what would be considered white.
Lang then goes on to prove her opinion as fact, that Asian hatred is real, but being downplayed by a biased media.
Lang provides an unbalanced and poorly sourced factual claim to begin the narrative: Asian Americans have faced racist violence at a much higher rate than in previous years and the Atlanta shooting is another example of the long history of anti-Asian racism in America. [1]
First off, Lang is using data from Stop AAPI Hate, whose very name implies the group is looking for anti-Asian violence. To claim Asian Americans have faced racist violence because of offensive speech is simply another opinion as fact. This is a left-wing talking point, but is not logical nor is it supported by any facts. In the most present action, the shooter by his own admission and the opinion of local authorities, was not motivated by words but rather by his own motives.
Furthermore, Lang’s “evidence” for racist violence Asians have experienced is one story of a man who was yelled at with racial slurs on the subway.
According to Lang, Stop AAPI Hate uses “a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, [and] received 3,795 reports of anti-Asian discrimination between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021; women reported hate incidents at 2.3 times the rate of men.” [2] [3]
To begin with the actual data Lang provides is to begin with a problem. The reporting database compiles harassment which includes categories of verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault, civil rights violations, and online harassment.
Verbal harassment and shunning make up 88% of the violations received. Some of these violations are legitimately unkind and resemble something of a middle school playground. But others are less legitimate, one example is a student who reported that “One of [her] professors was talking about the public health response to COVID-19 and explicitly called it the “China Virus” and that “we’ve gotta be very careful about that country and what they’d do to us.”
Some of what constitutes harassment is making an association between COVID-19 and China. Considering the outbreak began in Wuhan, China and that the Chinese government has had an adversarial relationship with the U.S., this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Though verbal and online harassment are clearly unpleasant things, they are obviously not the same as a hate crime, which is defined by the FBI as a “traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” [8] It is Lang’s opinion that offensive speech is racist violence, not a legal definition. Thus, they don’t merit prosecution but still allow Lang to indict Americans.
Second, the database is self-reported, so there is no way to verify the truth of these claims. Finally, Lang ties a direct line between these incidents to historic events such as the Japanese internment camps in WWII. To compare shunning or avoidance to a literal internment camp insults both Asian Americans who faced such discrimination in WWII and any intelligent reader.
In addition to one-sided data provided by an activist group, Lang also includes several sources who clearly come from the same circle of believers. Lang cites writer and activist Roslyn Talusan who, per her Twitter bio, is a culture critic and anti-rape activist—clearly an expert. [9] She also cites writer Mia Sato, who explicitly writes how she is interested in “race/ethnicity, culture, politics, and especially the places where they all meet.” [10] [11] Lang also cites the Stop AAPI Hate co-founder, who has a clear predisposition to think as Lang does. Any pretense to objectivity is shattered, as Lang cites only sources who have a clear motivation to see race as a factor.
Lang’s strategy becomes evident throughout the article, and it comes to a head in her conclusion that 1] America is a racist country and 2] “Ending anti-Asian racism in the U.S. means confronting centuries of discrimination, violence and oppression, and recognizing how it manifests in the present day.” These conclusions are made “reasonable” on the basis of Lang’s opinions presented as factual statements.
One final, but wildly important fact Lang omits is that 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018 were committed by black people. For context, black people make up only 12% of the population, meaning they commit a disproportionate amount of crimes against Asians. [12] [13] Many of the recent media articles decrying anti-Asian violence are actually examples of blacks committing violence against Asians. One only need watch a video of CNN recounting several incidents of anti-Asian violence, and one will find the perpetrator is consistently black. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]
But the media only seems to care if the perpetrator is white, useful only to advance their peculiar narrative and to cover-up the obvious: that cities have become increasingly lawless, thus opening the way for more hateful violence to go unpunished. [21]
OUR RATING = #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Bibliography:
4] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14695693/wuhan-wet-market-china-covid/
5] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coronavirus-covid-19-wuhan-china-liyiyu-6480376/
6] https://abcnews.go.com/International/wuhan-year-covid-19/story?id=74948623
8] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes
9] https://twitter.com/roslyntalusan
10] https://twitter.com/MiaRSato
12] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/anti-asian-violence-cant-be-blamed-on-trump-supporters
13] https://www.financegeek.org/chinese/black-on-asian-crime/
14] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/us/san-francisco-vicha-ratanapakdee-asian-american-attacks/index.html
15] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/us/asian-american-racism.html
19] https://www.amren.com/features/2020/12/race-and-crime-who-attacks-whom/
20] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/anti-asian-violence-cant-be-blamed-on-trump-supporters
21] https://nypost.com/2021/03/22/anti-asian-crime-is-awful-but-white-supremacy-isnt-driving-it/
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